Just realised we have CCTV on our Sky box. I'm watching an interview with the outgoing World Bank country director for China, Yukon Huang.
With the final handover of power this week from Jiang Zemin (78) to Hu Jintao (61), the confirmation came that the Chinese Communist Party would continue it's policy of reform. Listening to Huang, it's obvious that much of China's strength lies in it's ability to throw all it's resources into achieving one objective, marketisation in this case. As Huang notes, the advantage of central planning lies in the ability to create large scale consensus, but this is moderated by the risk of throwing the government's resolve behind inappropriate decisions.
What interests me is, from a purely structural point of view, ignoring what decisions are actually made (e.g. the terrible human rights record in China), how different are the governmental systems in China and western democracies? You can draw a graph of the different techniques for creating the government, but how much effect does the will of the people have on a democracy in this country vs how little control does the average chinese exert when it comes to the day-to-day operations of government?
I was reading about post-war Japanese politics last week and that serves as an interesting example. Since the reconstruction, the Japanese government has been pretty much dominated by one party, the conservative Liberal Democrat Party. This party is huge but is highly factional. The prime minister is basically the leader of the largest faction or power sharing group of factions. The faction leader is chosen for his ability to raise funds for himself and his fellow party members. This is a democracy, but how different is it from the internal CPC power struggles that create the leadership for China?
China is a country of 1.2bn people and yet it is changing much more quickly than any other country in the world. Economically it defies all trends. This is surely due to it's consistent leadership goals. So ironically enough, the lack of change at the top, which we in the west see as a deficiency, is the unique cause of the massive amount of change in economic and industrial spheres, the kind of change which has lead to far greater change in the social sphere in the west, and must inevitably do so in China as well.
Talking to people with experience of the Chinese policy making, it seems that the country's people are share the desire for efficiency and to further China on the world platform that their government has placed centre stage. Surely they can not continue to elevate China for long before they have to consider non-economic metrics, such as education and social justice. Already huge issues of regional differences are coming to the fore, as they are in the US, much of Europe and around the world. Look again at the US, it's position in the world league tables of nice places to live is predicated almost solely on it's massive GDP, in social metrics it trails far behind Europe and other countries. The US is traditionally seen as a social paradise compared to China.
It's funny listening to the old red rhetoric though. Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Important Thought of Three Represents, both mentioned by Hu Jintao today, as he constantly referred to the greatness of Comrade Zemin, and the rest. Communism as expounded by the old Soviet Union and today by China does really scare me and piss me off, but you know, ignorance is bliss.
